The Harm Suffered by Many because of a Psychiatric Diagnosis is a Well-Kept Secret

Caplan not connected with Scientology, as explained in this Letter to the Editor.

People — even many psychotherapists — often assume that psychiatric diagnosis is a science. The fact is, however, that very little solid science goes into the creation of categories of psychiatric diagnosis or the application of them to patients. (For more about this, click on Further Reading button below) And when science is absent, every conceivable kind of bias can enter in to decisions about who is diagnosed as mentally ill and which label they are given.

The impetus for this website is the project of issuing a public call for Congressional hearings about psychiatric diagnosis. Since psychiatric diagnosis is unregulated, since many people are harmed because of getting a diagnosis, and since the extent of harm needs to be documented and ways to minimize such harm need to be found and implemented, Congressional hearings are one of six important steps that can be taken to reduce the harm. Hearings would put psychiatric diagnosis in the public eye and on the national agenda.

The concerns about psychiatric diagnosis apply not only to those diagnostic labels found in any official diagnostic manual but also to other diagnoses, since the latter are constantly being invented and used.

Further Reading

To read about the profoundly troubling implications of psychiatric diagnoses being overwhelmingly applied to people suffering from the effects of war, see this website for the book, where Paula J. Caplan writes a blog about matters related to this. She also writes about topics including but not limited to psychiatric diagnosis on her Psychology Today blogand her blog at paulajcaplan.net.

Two books contain extensive lists of descriptions of problems with psychiatric diagnosis.